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The White Glove Tracking site needs your help in finding Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of Jackson’s performance of Billy Jean. “Rather then write unnecessarily complex code to find the glove in every frame of the video I am asking for the assistance of 10,060 individual internet users to simply click and drag a box around the glove in one frame.” Don’t stop ‘til you get enough (white gloves located).
Video of Rodrigo y Gabriela performing at PopTech. Here’s my writeup from October. What isn’t apparent from the video (at least through my puny laptop speakers) is how loud the bass was from them thumping their guitars.
Andrew of Songs To Wear Pants To makes songs from suggestions you send him. You can even commission a song from him for a special occasion like a birthday or anniversary. Recent tracks include a Tetris rap and a song written for a guy who likes a girl but doesn’t know how to express it (she’s got “beautiful light blue eyes, long brown hair, and great athletic body” which Andrew translates as “I don’t even care about her personality” in the song).
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson’s C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson’s whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a “manifesto” by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb’s idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion’s ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times’ Newsroom Apart, I said “I’d rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications”. American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune’s Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer’s attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they’re not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it’s only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People’s Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn’t hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC’s greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). “Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.” (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July’s new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges’ site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I’m ashamed to say I’m still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you’ve finally convinced yourself that you’ve wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it’s a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode…you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you’re not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I’d never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication…a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback’s self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez’s Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits’ logo by LogoMaid.
Video of a two-song Arcade Fire show, one of which is sung in a freight elevator and the other in the middle of a Parisian crowd through a megaphone.
Snoop Dogg recently explained the difference between the language used by old, white radio announcers and rappers:
It’s a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about hos that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a n***a for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him.
What Mr. Dogg is arguing here is that it’s ok to refer to actual hoes as hoes in the service of artistic expression but it is not ok to refer to college basketball players as such for the purpose of demeaning people. As we’re currently engaged in another go-round on the issue of speech, political correctness, and its potential enforcement, it’s not hard to imagine that someday an argument like Snoop Dogg’s will be deployed in a court of law. I wonder if anyone will buy it?
Duncan Watts on the results of a study which show that a cultural product’s popularity is partially determined by inital social adoption patterns. “This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous ‘butterfly effect’ from chaos theory.” The effort to explain why popular things got popular is probably impossible…working your way back from effect to cause in non-linear systems is tough.
Audio demonstration of how two Nickelback songs released two years apart are actually, to a rough approximation, the same song. “You bastards, you’re taking advantage of those tone deaf MTV brainwashed twats who are too thick to notice you’re releasing song that are EXACTLY THE SAME as ones your recorded earlier.”
Hip-Hop Pop-Up combines pop-up web advertising with product mentions in hip-hop songs. “For example, at 2 minutes and 38 seconds into the song Big Poppa when Puffy asks Biggie, ‘How ya livin Biggie Smallz?’ his reply, ‘In mansion and Benz’s Givin ends to my friends and it feels stupendous’ would then pop-up the URL www.mercedes-benz.com.” To try it out, be sure to disable your browser’s pop-up blocking first. (thx, jonah)
Fascinating stuff: the Washington Post hired a world-famous violinist to play for spare change outside a D.C. Metro station to see if anyone would notice and how much he’d make. “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” (thx, karan)
Update: A NYC subway musician’s take on the article: “The thing is Joshua Bell is a great violinist but he doesn’t know how to busk.” (thx, greg)
Logical, linguistical, and infographical analysis of the #1 single on the Billboard chart, This Is Why I’m Hot by Mims. “Mims is hot because he’s fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one’s being fly? […] It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren’t at least one, you are neither.” (via khoi)
Apple and EMI jointly announced earlier this week that the iTMS would offer EMI’s music without DRM and at a bitrate of 256 kps instead of 128 kps. Twice the bitrate = twice as good, yeah? Not so fast…you might not even notice the difference.
This is brilliant: the weird video of Dick Cheney lurking in the bushes during a press conference at the White House with Radiohead’s Creep playing over it. “I want you to notice when I’m not around….” (via cyn-c)
A Stradivarius fetched $2.4 million at auction yesterday but anyone with the proper chops got to take a climate-controlled test drive before the auction. The violin’s minders at Christie’s screened potential players, in part, by looking for “the telltale bruise under the jaw that comes from resting on the chin rest of the violin”, which Lilly calls a “violin hickey”. There are several theories as to why Antonio Stradivari’s instruments sound so wonderful, but no one has cracked the mystery yet.
Apple will begin to sell DRM-free songs from EMI via the iTunes Music Store in May. The songs are higher quality but will cost slightly more ($1.29 vs $0.99 for the DRM version). It’ll be interesting to see how many people choose to buy the non-DRM stuff at the higher price. My feeling is that typical consumers won’t care that much…lower price will win out over slightly higher quality and some nebulous future flexibility. I bet EMI is even half-hoping for failure on this thing: “see, customers *want* DRM…”
Interview with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross about, among other things, his upcoming book on 20th century music. “Why, when paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock go for a hundred million dollars or more on the art market and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, is twentieth-century classical music still considered obscure and difficult? In fact, it’s better known than most people realize. Post-1900 music is all over Hollywood soundtracks, modern jazz, alternative rock.”
50 50 is a compilation of 50 videos of people singing 50 Cent songs.
(via your daily awesome)
Simlish is the fictional language spoken in the Sims games. Several music artists have recorded songs sung in Simlish.
Video of a live performance of Creep by a Radiohead quite different than today’s version.
The Golden Ratio and its appearance in the music of Nintendo’s Zelda games.
A dad sings NWA’s Fuck The Police to his young son using some creative realtime censorship. “‘Cause he’ll tickle you ‘til you’re giggling.” (via the grumpiest)
A 666 tribute to David Fincher featuring video of 6 of his commercials, 6 of his music videos, and 6 of his movies.
List of sampled songs used by Daft Punk. Here’s a video of some of them.
Beatboxing flautist + Super Mario theme song = YouTube gold.
A list of unboundedly long songs, songs that “continue until the singer decides (or is forced) to stop”.
Neat music video by a band called The Longcut that uses infographics to tell the story of a boy and girl falling for each other.
Complaints choirs…that is, groups of people who sing their dissatisfaction in front of live audiences. “In Helsinki the most favourite topics were ring tones of mobile phones, people who smell in public transport and the fact that Finland always looses to Sweden in competitions: in Icehockey and in Eurovision.” (thx, nancy)
Steve Jobs’ thoughts on music and DRM. Sounds like he’d rather that music sold via the iTMS didn’t have DRM built in.
“iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city.” (thx janelle)
Music industry: CD prices are being driven down by $9.99 albums on iTunes Music Store. “Physical retailers are pressuring the labels downward on price (of course, Wal-Mart is the biggest culprit) because they don’t want to be undercut by iTunes 9.99 on all single albums. We’re rapidly moving to a 9.99 world on the big sellers (the ones stocked in Target and Wal-Mart and Best Buy).”
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